Newtonville Books Community Blog

So I’m reading Scorch Atlas, Blake Butler’s harrowing (and I mean F#A#∞-style bleak) debut novel-in-stories about, well, the apocalypse, and I thought I’d read some of the Amazon.com reviews just for the hell of it, since this is one of the most unique and most terrifying works I’ve read in quite some time. I’m going to write more about the book in a later post when I’m finished with it, but I just wanted to pose the question of what it means that Amazon has two “communities” — The Post-Apocalyptic Community and The End of the World Community — which include contributions from more than 11,500 customers. Strange times, these.